A common technique for monitoring the health of a network device is the generation and forwarding to the network device a health check request. A response from the network device to the health check request provides an indication as to the availability of a service, response time, or state of the network device.
Available “health check” applications provide a pre-determined set of health check requests for determining the availability of a resource of a network device. Although the available pre-determined sets of health check requests provide some user flexibility that allows a user to select the best individual health check request or set of health check requests, the predefined health checks do not support every environment or application. The available “health check” applications are often protocol specific and therefore limited in their application. As such, users having specific requirements beyond the capability of the pre-defined health check requests need to develop one or more health check requests in order to support a specific requirement.
The development of application specific or enterprise specific health check requests is burdensome, requiring an individual to have programming skills and knowledge of the protocol supported by the application or enterprise. Consequently, development of such specific health check requests is costly and time consuming due to the engineering development and possible functional testing of the health check requests required prior to actual deployment.
Accordingly, there exists a need for building or generating health check requests suitable for use with any protocol in any environment without the delay associated with engineering development, testing, and other undesirable burdens.